Friday, February 15, 2008

Children of the Ghetto

Along with Louise Glück's "Midsummer" (which I commented on here), I was struck by two other poems in the February 2008 issue of Poetry, both by George Szirtes: "Ross: Children of the Ghetto" and "Petersen: Kleichen and a Man." The former is one of those rare villanelles that fully justifies its form by putting the villanelle's obsessive repetition to perfect use. The latter is a wonderful nonce form in which the last six lines repeat the end words of the first six lines in reverse order. (Or does this form have a name?)

The two poems are part of a set of seven Szirtes poems based on photographs, "In the Face of History."

This post was made from Todtnauberg, but I don't think that makes it Heideggerian (or a Celanian critique of Heidegger). :-)

1 comment:

brian (baj) salchert said...

Where poems come from,
who knows;
but if they come in formal dress,
then they do.

Thank you for these.